257 Quotes About Russian

MuseWhen at night I wait for her to come,Life, it seems, hangs by a single strand.What are glory, youth, freedom, in comparisonwith the dear welcome guest, a flute in hand?She enters now. Pushing her veil aside,she stares through me with her attentiveness.I question her: 'And were you Dante's guide,dictating the Inferno?' She answers: 'Yes.

And you, my friends who have been called away,I have been spared to mourn for you and weep,not as a frozen willow over your memory,but to cry to the world the names of those who sleep. What names are those!I slam shut the calendar,down on your knees, all!Blood of my heart,the people of Leningrad march out in even rows,the living, the dead: fame can't tell them apart.

A shoe's material - leather - is calculable and finite. work of art's material (not sound, not word, not stone, not canvas, but spirit) is incalculable and infinite. There are no shoes once for always. Every last line of Sappho is once for always. This is why (calculability of material) boots held by the bootmaker are in better hands than are poems in the hand of the critic. There are no misunderstood boots, but how many misunderstood poems!

A poet's marriage to his time is a forced marriage. A marriage of which - as of any suffered violence - he is ashamed, and from which he tries to tear loose. Poets of the past tear into the past, those of the present into the future, as if time were less time for not being my own! All Soviet poetry is a stake on the future. Solely Mayakovsky, this zealot of his own conscience, this convict of the present day, came to love this present day; overcame, that is, the poet in himself.

Do you really not know that to praise a woman's mind is to abuse her? Is everyone not convinced that where there's cleverness there's no heart? Has it not been decided that a clever woman is a sort of monster who can feel nothing? Ask anyone, they'll all tell you so.

There are Four of UsI have turned aside from everything,from the whole earthly store.The spirit and guardian of this placeis an old tree-stump in water.We are brief guests of the earth, as it were,and life is a habit we put on.On paths of air I seem to overheartwo friendly voices, talking in turn.Did I say two?...There by the east wall's tangle of raspberry,is a branch of elder, dark and fresh.Why! It's a letter from Marina.November 1962 (in delirium)

- Why are your poems so different from one another?- Because the years are different.

He knew this place, where once in sport/The flood had played and waves had bubbled,/Defiant in their fierce despair;/He knew these lions, and this square,/And him whose bronze head dominated/The darkness from its lofty height –/Whose fateful head will had on this site/Decreed a city be created.

Poor land, poor land, what do you meanto the heart that moves in me?Poor love, poor love, poor wife of mine,why do you weep so bitterly?(from Retribution book 2, I)